Today is day three of the new job.

Adam: It's the third day. You know what that means?
Sarah: I have to put out?
Adam: . . . We've been together too long.
Sarah: Yeah.

The job is interesting, and eventually they'll let me do it, but the past two days have involved HR paperwork and watching coworkers with longer tenure work. Eight hours. Of watching other people type. And since I'm not stalking anyone of them, it's not as compelling as it could be.

But it'll get better. Today they're letting me file!

The job doesn't quite feel like the job yet. I'm only about 1000 yards from the Journal, and I've had to make a concentrated effort to not turn into the editorial parking lot each time I've driven past. I keep bumping into former co-workers at Starbucks, and keep referring to my time at the Journal in the present tense. "On my desk, we do this" for example -- which makes it sound like I've died and this is the afterlife.

But let's not compare the new job to death. Let's compare it to attending camp: it's summer, it's an activity to get me out of the house and it's not school, but it doesn't feel real.

It'll feel real eventually.

And now, to follow in the footsteps of every other Albuquerque blogger, I give you the WaPo critique!

Washington Post reporter Sridhar Pappu opened a profile on former US Attorney David Iglesias thusly:

At 9 a.m. on the very edge of the dusty, desolate collection of adobe homes and Vietnamese restaurants that seem to form this city, David Iglesias begins his run through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. This is not easy terrain. The footing is terribly uneven. The altitude can be unbearable. At certain times one can hear the grumbling of mountain lions and the feasting of coyotes.

There are so many things wrong with this lede. Like, dusty? Only in days ending in -y, but is that a problem? Desolate -- I don't think that word means what Sridhar Pappu thinks it means.

Webster's defines it thusly:

1 : devoid of inhabitants and visitors
[That booming population of 750,000? Is all in your MIND!]

2 : joyless, disconsolate, and sorrowful through or as if through separation from a loved one [I'm guessing that to someone from the east coast, we could all be mourning separation from using water with reckless abandon, but c'mon.]

3 a : showing the effects of abandonment and neglect : DILAPIDATED b : BARREN, LIFELESS c : devoid of warmth, comfort, or hope : GLOOMY desolate memories>
[No, no, it's a desert, no.]

And then he hits the pervasive stereotypes of Albuquerque: adobe houses and . . . Vietnamese restaurants?

That's a new one.

The lede further descends into histrionics with the unbearable altitude, and the descriptions of animal noises. Oh, man. Mountain lions scream, dude. The scream sounds like a woman. I know this, because there was a mountain lion den near my childhood neighborhood, and they liked to let loose with blood-curdling screams when they were picking off the house pets.

And the sound of a coyote feasting is less yummy huffing noises and more yummy huffing noises coming out of a city-issued garbage can. With loud thumping thrown in for good measure. Like a happy puppy rolling in trash, only not quite.

Or at least, that's how the west side coyotes roll.

I appreciate the reporter's attempt to throw in some local color, to transport readers to the Duke City and give them a glimpse of life in Albuquerque, but seriously, that version of Albuquerque is totally unrecognizable to the locals, and damn off-putting to anyone who has never bothered leaving the beltway.

Which means, now that I'm in the new job, I can say this:

Damn journalists. Always get it wrong.

Labels: albuquerque, meta, workin' stiff

A red light camera violation never did turn up, so I imagine I'm off the hook.

Which means there's a stack of six violations sitting in my mailbox.

But still.

Labels: albuquerque, driving, meta

[The internet tubes at home are clogged, and we totally spaced buying some digital Draino last week. I'll only have limited access for the next 24-48 hours, meaning at work, meaning tomorrow, meaning my the day of heaviest workload for the week. What does this mean to you? If you sent me an e-mail or commented, it might be awhile until I get back to you. I don't hate you, I'm just stuck.]

One of the things I love about Albuquerque is the seasonal stubborness that comes out. Once that thermometer hits 75 degrees three days in a row, an official proclaimation goes out declaring it's spring, man. Doesn't matter what the Weather Nerd says, doesn't matter how many late season cold fronts plow through the state, it's friggin' spring. Dress accordingly.

On my way into work this morning, I saw this practice embraced by every pedistrian I passed. Even though it was barely 40 degrees, there was the guy running in shorts and a tank-top, the mom in a mini skirt pushing her toddler (dressed in a t-shirt and howling, because it was friggin' cold, Mom!) to playgroup. Kids out on spring break were lounging around in jeans and t-shirts, their hands shoved into their arm pits, their lips turning a lovely shade of blue.

It's spring in Albuquerque. It's not cold. You're just a wuss.

Its the same sort of willful suspension of disbelief that sees homeowners on the roof Thanksgiving weekend, finally getting around to winterizing their swamp coolers. Until then, the chore was put off with the irrational argument of, "Well, you know, it always get really hot in October, and you'll want the cooler then."

For the record, it's never that hot in October.

Ah, Albuquerque, this is why I love you.

Labels: albuquerque, meta, weather

Well, hell. I think I got popped by the red light camera at Jefferson and Paseo del Norte. Doesn't that just suck?

That niggling feeling of crap! has been lingering since just after I exited the intersection. You know how it goes: you roll up to one of these camera-monitored spaces, trying so hard not to break the law, and then for the rest of the day you're asking yourself "Did I come to a full and complete stop? Like with a period and everything?"

I'm pretty sure I didn't STOP. I stopped long enough to see the intersection was clear, but did I stop-stop? I can't remember, and I don't think I did. The memory banks are telling me the tires might have been rolling.

Crap.

This is what I don't like about Marty's Income Generating Cameras of Justice -- that lack of gray area. A cop most likely wouldn't have flinched at the California stop. The camera will be relieving me of that benjamin.

I'll be the first person to admit I was being stupid if I did actually run the light. I usually carry a healthy heaping of paranoia in relation to the camera: it's all five miles under the limit and panic stops because as much as I love Albuquerque, I can think of better things to do with my hundred dollars than pay a fine.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Labels: albuquerque, driving, meta

Today's weirdness.

~ At the corner of Paseo and Eagle Ranch NW: I had the top down on Bucky and was waiting for the light to turn green in the center/left lane. A work truck coasts to a stop in the turn lane next to me, and the driver shouts: "HEY! GRACE KELLY!" and I turn to see if he's yelling at me (he is) and he grins and shouts, "YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL!"

This proves my theory that a reasonably plain woman is knocked into the top 10% the minute she gets into a classic roadster.

Also, Grace Kelly? Was blonde. If we're going to tag me as a generally known, classic dead celebrity, can't I be Audrey Hepburn? The hair color's right, at least. Or Liz Taylor, minus the seven marriages?

Oh, I shouldn't complain. Grace Kelly got an Hermes bag and free tickets for life to the Monaco GP. That's pretty darn good.


(And I'm still not seeing it.)

~ I made cookies for Adam over the weekend. Nothing major, just oatmeal chocolate chip. Adam took a couple with us while we ran errands on Sunday, and ended up leaving one in the Civic. I remembered it was there, as you do at 3 a.m. Just a thought of, "Remember to get that out of there before all the chocolate melts and stains the oh-so-unreplaceable upholstry." Which I did remember this morning. Only, when I went out to the Civic (the only car we keep unlocked and parked on the street), the cookie was gone. I assumed Adam had grabbed it and eaten it (because, OMG cookie), but when I asked him later, he had not.

A cursory search of the Civic proved cookie-less.

I can only imagine what happened. Some kid on the way to the bus stop passed our car and said "ooooooh! cookie" or the weird neighbor was . . . doing something near the Civic and was feeling a little peckish. I don't know. Lock your doors; there's a cookie thief loose on the West Mesa.

Labels: albuquerque, meta, weirdness

One of my very favorite places is the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque's Old Town. I know every city has a museum like this, that it's a variation on a theme: kid-friendly, hands-on science with a generous helping of dinosaurs. I've been to a lot of those museums. Heck, I have been to museums all over this planet of ours, and I think our little tribute to the natural world is one of the best.

My parents made a special trip to Albuquerque when it opened twenty-some years ago, which was unheard of. A trip to Albuquerque in those pre-Costco days meant we were flying somewhere, otherwise there was no justification for the four hour car trip and expense of a night in a hotel. But when the museum opened, we were so there.

I remember how friggin' awesome the musuem was, especially to an eight-year-old. There was an automated T-Rex that roared, and a simulated volcano that you could walk through (and over glowing "lava" which always thrilled me). I remember how I could spend hours staring up at the leg bone of a brachiosaurus, and hanging around the stegosauraus affectionately known as Spike. The displays on New Mexico's sea coast and the origins of DNA were awe-inspiring to a little kid with an already nerdy bent, and unlike the Louvre, this new museum was hands on. There were buttons to push, and mammoth skulls to touch and a whole room dedicated for children to explore the natural room. Unfortunately, this room also had the collection of live snakes, which always seemed to be out for touching, and I am not a fan of the slitheries, so there was always an air of danger going into the resource room.

My mother -- a docent, now -- still refuses to go in there.

After that first trip, no visit to Albuquerque was complete without a run through the museum. Seriously. Doctors' appointments were followed by some quality time hanging out in the volcano, which just made the former Albuquerque contingent go, "Oh, MAN," because sometimes you just need to hang out in a lightless room dedicated to liquid hot magma.

In the last year, my parents have become volunteers for the museum. My mother is an on-again, off-again docent. "Here are the dinosaurs. There are the bathrooms." My dad, a former physical science teacher, is training to become a chiseler, one of those guys you see in the Fossil Works lab in the center of the downstairs, carving out fossils from bedrock with dental tools. How friggin' cool is that? His training has been on a mammoth skeleton, but after graduation there's talk of moving up to dinosaurs. My dad's a total rock star.

The museum is one of those happy places where I can go in feeling kind of down and come out feeling rather cheerful. It's a lovely space in a lovely city.

We went to the museum yesterday for the first time in ages, after the gawdforsaken autocross on Saturday. We took a messenger bag stuffed full of Uglydolls and cameras and spent an enjoyable couple of hours running around our favorite exhibits taking stupid pictures and talking about how we loved coming here as kids and our childhoods in general. It felt like we were visiting old friends. We shoved a couple of dollars into the Stan collection fund and were rewarded with a roar similar to the long-gone animatronic T-Rex. It was a good day.

Labels: albuquerque, meta

Oy, the wind. Right now, it's blowing at the house and screeching through the gaps in the windows (gotta love that tract housing!), and it sounds exactly like a toddler I babysat a million years ago. She (and the wind) would start out with a low moan of discontent before amping up into a full-blast wail of "WAAAAAAAAAAAA" before mixing it up with pauses and shrieks.

And now that I'm flashing back, I'm realizing that toddler will be graduating from high school this year, and good lord, that's just not right.

Wind in New Mexico is something to be endured. The joke is the windy season starts in January and ends on December 31 -- or if you prefer -- New Mexico has three seasons: hot, cold and windy.

Like the Santa Ana in California, the New Mexico wind makes people crazy. Everyone's on edge; one minor inconvenience away from going "Falling Down." It's the constant howling, the dust obscuring the sky and the mountains, well-mannered pets going nuts, and the pile of tumbleweeds lodged under every single car in the lot that pushes everyone to the breaking point. It's like being marooned on top of Mt. Washington with 750,000 of your not so nearest-and-dearest.

Add the full moon into the equation, and you've got one big pot of crazy. There was a lot of road rage today; apart from the usual tailgating and cutting off, people were using their horns. You folks back east might snicker, but if there's one universal rule of the road in these parts, it would be You. Don't Honk. Ever. And today everyone was honking. The commute was an exercise in automotive meditation, kicking back, signaling early, not speeding but not going too slow and not trying anything stupid. I was not the person cutting off the ambulance today.

I'm serious.

Wedge the Weather Nerd is promising that the wind won't be as bad tomorrow, but still blustery. I'm trying to look at this as a positive -- I get to wear my spiffy new hat! -- but I'm just as on edge. My dear sweet husband is making the normal noises of being a living human, and it is taking all of my self-control not to bite his head off. Nails on a chalkboard combined with a dentist's drill, mashed-up with a Rush drum solo has nothing on this right now.

I'm going insane.

Kisses,
Not the Preying Mantis

Labels: albuquerque, meta, weather

Day Two

The smart move would have been a mid-week grocery run after Hyperbole the Weather Dude told us we were going to get hit by the storm. The smart move would have been investing in a snow shovel and a pair of moon boots each, and gloves. Holy crap, dudes. Gloves.

But we didn't make a mid-week grocery run, and we don't have a snow shovel or moon boots or the rest of it.

And while it might make you Northerners laugh, we admitted defeat. 11" of snow FTW. Seriously, I haven't seen this much snow in ten years. Adam's only seen this much snow one other time in his life.

"Yeah," he said, doing the dude-surveying-his-domain-fist-on-hips stance. "We're stuck. At home. Again."

Not that there's any problems with being stuck at home while the world's draped in eleven inches of fondant. Staying at home means lounging around in my fluffy robe and fluffy slippers and fluffy monkey pants (I like being fluffy) and reading Christopher Moore books while Adam rocks out with Guitar Hero II. Staying at home means I will make breakfast, grilled cheese and jalapeno sammiches, oatmeal raisin cookies and stew. and I'll still clean up the kitchen. And staying at home means getting bored around two o' clock and deciding yeah, it's time to build a snowman.



Or, um, Snow Jabba in our case. We're nerds, but we've established this.



Really big nerds.



Really, really big nerds.

And now we're going to spend the evening lying around the living room coming up with Old Years Resolutions, because it's easier to come up with something you have one day to fix than the other way around. For instance, I'm going to do laundry.

Ahhh, I feel better already.

Labels: adam, albuquerque, nerdom, snow, snow jabba

What have we learned today, children?

1. The Civic's battery, like so many terminally ill, will wait until just after the holidays to die. And not just run out of juice, but shuffle-ball-change that mortal coil right off for extra post-holiday fun and migraines.

1. a. The Civic's battery will also choose the snowiest day in Albuquerque's history to stage said death.

2. Lightweight rear wheel drive roadsters should not come into contact with snow under any circumstance.

3. Adam is wise, even if I did (temporarily) prevail.

and finally,

4. Saddam. Not a vampire.

(Everyone and everything is fine. Just, grrrrrr. Be safe, okay?)

Labels: albuquerque, bucky, miata, snow

Okay, we have a new game, inspired by this post on the Fix. The game is called "When I am Dictator of Albuquerque."

Highlights of last night's round include:
* The invention of the golden foot attached to a jewel-studded rod for the dictator's ceremonial putting down of the foot.
* Free one-way bus tickets to Iowa for anyone complaining about all the brown people.
* Seizure of all chain dining establishments (save Gardunos, Dion's and Blake's) and the redistribution of buildings to families who would like to try their hands at the restaurant business.
* West Mesa reclaimation project. This would involve bulldozing my own subdivision.
* Manditory water conservation. You will be issued a rain barrel. If you demand your Kentucky Blue Grass, we will provide you with ticket to Kentucky and a mint julep for the ride.
* For obvious reasons, the Balloon Fiesta will be moved from the first week of October to the second week of October.
* Vehicles will be regulated, and you will only be allowed to have as much car as you need. All SUVs would be immediately barred from city streets.
* Hello, elevated monorail.
* The chile harvest would be recognized as a city-wide holiday.

What would you do?

Labels: albuquerque, stupid games

I give Adam the same piece of hell daily. That is, I very much enjoy reminding him (neener-neener) that while my family's been parked in New Mexico for generations, he suffered the indignity of being born in Kansas.

Neener-neener.

Seriously. This is the one upper hand I've got. I'm as native as you can get (post Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo) and he's . . . well, he's from Kansas.

This is an especially fun game because his parents moved to Albuquerque before he was out of diapers and New Mexico is all he's known. For all intensive purposes, he's a New Mexican through and through; it's just that pesky detail of not being born in the 505 that gets his goat every single time.

So I like to mutter things like "Kansas" and watch the vein in his forehead throb and he likes to counter by proving just how New Mexican he really is. He does this by full embracing the gift of our cuisine.

He was well on his way when I met him a zillion years ago. He was rocking the same chile addiction every other New Mexican has; green chile was slopped onto burgers and eggs and tacos without thinking, the hotter the better. Salsa was used in lieu of ketchup. Traveling outside of the state, he would whimper for Tobasco (handy in a pinch and widely availible).

But then last fall, one of his co-workers brought in fresh chile from his chile garden and Adam decided to make salsa. And I know I've posted pictures upon pictures of his weekly salsaings, but pictures do not begin to convey the quality of his salsa. Spicy and tasty and hot and delicious. His salsa is some of the best I've ever tasted, and I'm not just saying that because he's sitting six inches to my right. The man can make salsa.

From there, he branched into guacamole. And then enchiladas and fajitas and rellenos. Suddenly it was fall again and we had two bushels of chile spread across two freezers and it doesn't seem to be enough. Chile has turned from a preference to a hobby to an obsession.

No, that's an understatement. It's not just the chile. I do believe his quest in life is to make the entire Gardunos' menu from scratch and to make it better. Right now, all we need to do is to attempt bizcochitos and tamales for Christmas, and we'll be set, which is really a subtle, show-off-y way of saying that today we made our own tortillas and sopapillas from scratch.



If you go into Flickr, you'll see all the notes. Believe me, they're silly enough to look at.

Also, I'm too tired to figure out how to tie this into the narrative, so I'll just straight-out pimp this. If you want a piece (heh) of the Wolf chile crazy, check out his mother's block-of-the-month Chili Sampler quilt. You should totally buy it. You should also totally buy one for every other person you know. It is one of the most creative quilt designs I've ever seen and it was thought up by my mother-in-law, which makes it that much more awesome, and also, it's chile. Did I mention that part?

Labels: adam, albuquerque, chile, food, new mexico